If every day was like Monday, no one would have wasted a word on the festival’s short-falls.
HEALTH blasted through the stratosphere with vocals up in the mix and leading the way, followed by fractured noise shards spinning out of control like so many fragments of an exploding bomb. Earlier in the day, Best Fwends’ automated computer robot MC announced song titles and used the word “fucking” a lot while the full band played the cheeriest punk set of the weekend. Indian Jewelry traumatized half its virgin audience and wooed the other with a set that even sounded lo-fi crunchy without any translation to analog tape decks. Alexico’s quirky laptop twists were a campfiery anecdote to Dan Deacon’s fun house the night before.
Liars were the most terrifying act of the week, seemingly rousing all of the antagonistic narco-fears that brooded under the festival’s lid all weekend. For a song like “Here Comes All the People,” rather subdued on record, Angus Andrew wailed the chorus, “counting victims one by one” at the clustered crowd, simultaneously play-acting a murderer and taunting the surrounding hills for some violence.
